A little girl happily playing in the children's corner of a Shanghai KFC
outlet yesterday had no idea of the evening of horror in store for her at the
hands of a man who was moving towards her with a kitchen knife in his hand.

He grabbed the girl and for the next seven hours held the knife at her
throat. Besieged by police, inside the store he continued to terrorize the girl
while her father and mother looked on helplessly.

The girl's mother had
taken her four-year-old daughter to the KFC outlet in Times Extra, a shopping
mall at the intersection of Yangliuqing and Wuning roads in Putuo District at
mid-afternoon yesterday.

While the mother, Li Wenhui, was buying food at
the counter and her daughter was playing in the children's corner, a man aged
about 50 and dressed in purple clothes was creeping towards her. He stepped over
a slide and moved into the children's corner. He took out a kitchen knife from
underneath his coat and held it to the girl's throat, an eyewitness, a shop
assistant surnamed Chen said.

"It was 2:50pm. I was standing inside a
counter of the cell phone mart next door to the KFC and I could see clearly see
what happened in the children's corner," Chen said.

Another shop
assistant surnamed Li said she had noticed the grey-haired man wandering about
the shopping mall for some time before the attack.

"He seemed to grab a
brick-sized thing but I could not see it clearly," Li said.

Other
witnesses recalled that the mother was crying. She had taken out her wallet and
pleaded with the man to release her little girl. The man was yelling out that "I
want to eat KFC," witnesses said.

The girl also begged the man not to
kill her and promised that she would never come to the store again.

Wang Ziyin, the girl's father, arrived at 3:30pm after receiving a phone
call. He said they didn't know the man. He and his wife are migrant workers from
Anhui Province, and the family lives in Jiading District.

While police
tried to negotiate with the man, a big crowd of onlookers surrounded the
shopping mall, causing serious traffic congestion.

During talks between
police experts and the man, three pot plants and two bundles of roses were
carried into the store and boxes were also piled up to allow police snipers to
hide behind.

The man also asked the police to get him a red taxi around
5pm but he decided not to take it.

Some witnesses said they thought the
man had a mental disease but police said he behaved calmly during the seven-hour
stand-off.

Around 9:40pm, the man became agitated and tried to hurt the
girl. A police sniper immediately shot him dead. The girl was taken to a
hospital by a waiting ambulance.

The girl and her mother are now both in
Putuo District Center Hospital.

"The girl was smiling at seeing so many
people looking at her," a patient said.